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Connect Group

Welcome to Connect Group, a full service, integrated communications agency based in London and the West Midlands. Specialising in marketing, advertising, digital solutions and PR, we combine scientific thinking and sophisticated technology to deliver award-winning creativity and results.

Thymeleaf & Thymesheet

We are keen to improve the way HTML and Java developers work together. To that end we identified Thymeleaf's natural templating system as a great way to do just that.

So what is natural templating?

Essentially this means using vanilla HTML and embellishing it a little with 'attributes'. The HTML still works just fine; and the Java server has hooks that allow it to add real, live data to the HTML.

We came up with Thymesheet as a way to take this one step further. What if you don't have to alter the HTML at all? Thymesheet is to Thymeleaf what CSS is to HTML.

Learn more about Thymesheet

Thymeleaf and Test Driven Development

To support Test Driven Development within several agile Java development teams at Connect, we use a simple methodology for Thymeleaf (and Thymesheet) which lets us develop small JUnit test cases as we build our sites. This utilises the CSS3 selectors from Thymesheet to create simple, readable unit tests.

This complements automated testing such as Selenium and contributes to the quality and agile practices in use at Connect.

For more information about how we do this, Learn more about Thymeleaf TDD

Griddl

An awesome responsive framework, Griddl was developed at Connect and used on one of our most exciting projects, Jaguar Global Websites

Umbraco

Connect are proud to both utilise and support the excellent open source content management system, Umbraco